For most college and university instructors in the United States today, teaching provides neither the job security nor income typically associated with middle class careers. That is because about 70 percent of all instructors are not eligible for tenure.

Ten years ago, one of the most radical unions in the hemisphere, the Sección XXII of Mexico’s National Education Workers’ Union (SNTE), led a vibrant movement against the state governor’s heavy-handed rule in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The demonstrations, known to many as the “Oaxaca Commune,” featured six months of mass marches, public encampments, and neighborhood barricades.

Patrick S. O’Donnell has updated his monumental bibliography on the labor movement to account for the year 2015. “This bibliography,” writes the author, “contains a number of titles dealing with “workers,” the “world of work” generally, and “labor law” in particular, so as to account for some of the more compelling reasons we should assiduously attend to the complex economic and moral questions (the former often including some of the latter) regarding the labor, working conditions, and leisure time of working people.”

Public education today is at the center of an unrelenting assault on the American labor movement. This is no accident; by some measures, nearly 40% of unionized workers in the United States work in education, and organized educators have proven vocal opponents of neoliberal politicians and policies.

Today we launch the teachers/public sector toolkit, a set of resources that we hope will contribute to dialog on teacher and public sector unionism. We are asking for help in disseminating and adding to this toolkit, which is accessible under teaching resources.

Growing Apart is one of the most valuable tools for teaching about labor and inequality that I have seen in recent years. It’s a one-stop place for all the great graphs and charts to show the rise in inequality, the rise of right-to-work states, the declining value of the minimum wage versus the rise in executive pay at the top.This great new website by Colin Gordon is a treasure trove as a teaching resource.

The history of teacher unionism is rich and vibrant, filled with numerous triumphs, tensions, and setbacks. For over a century, most education employees have been part of a public sector workforce that has been constrained by legal frameworks that assume that they are not entitled to the same rights as private sector workers.